Made-in-America CEOs are rooting for a manufacturing comeback, but they say it takes time to do it right

• CEOs of made-in-America businesses say there are real benefits from boosting domestic manufacturing.
• Achieving that goal, however, takes no small measure of time, money, and planning, they said.
• "I just don't see the reason why we can't bring this back," Darn Tough Vermont's CEO told BI.

As markets fluctuate with the United States' shifting trade policy, CEOs of American-made companies are optimistic about the push for more products to be manufactured in the US.

Ric Cabot, the founder and CEO of Darn Tough, a Vermont-based sock maker, told Business Insider he welcomes the prospect of made-in-America businesses making a comeback, even if he has some reservations about the speed and unpredictability of the White House's current approach.

"For the first time, and hopefully not for the last time, domestic manufacturing is in a good spot," he said. "But you gotta commit. You gotta commit to making it here. It isn't easy. Nobody outsources anything for quality."

Darn Tough and other domestic manufacturers could stand to benefit from a higher tariff environment. With much of its merino wool sourced from within the US and all of its manufacturing done here, Darn Tough wouldn't face the kind of cost increases that competing apparel brands that rely on overseas production would have to navigate.

Darn Tough's guaranteed-for-life products fetch a premium price — a typical pair of Darn Tough socks costs $25 compared to lower-cost wool socks on Amazon listed for $3 — but that higher cost might not look so daunting if imported alternatives start to get more expensive.

That's part of what the Trump administration hopes to accomplish with its tariff policy.

"Tariffs are a means to an end, and I think that end is bringing the manufacturing base back to the US," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a February interview with Fox News. In other interviews, Bessent has acknowledged that US consumption could decrease as international trade rebalances.

"There's a lot of misunderstanding about what's possible here, and it's mostly coming from the big companies," Bayard Winthrop, the founder and CEO of the California-based apparel maker American Giant, said.

"You can absolutely — particularly in knitwear — make very high-quality, very large volume knitwear in the United States; they've just forgotten how to do it," he said.

Winthrop told BI that he welcomes the attention on domestic manufacturing after what he described as four decades of neglect, but he's less comfortable with the administration's heavy-handed approach to trade.

"I don't like the instability, I don't like the threat of the speed and the breadth of this stuff, and I certainly don't think that we ought to be treating our friendly allies, like Canada and Vietnam, the same way we're treating China," he said.

Building up production capacity for these American-made companies took years of cultivating supply chains, facilities, and talent — in other words, it's not the sort of thing that can be done overnight or in 90 days.

Decked, an Idaho-based company that's been in business for a decade, makes its truck-storage-system products at factories in Ohio and Utah.

CEO Bill Banta told BI the first stage of the business involved a careful discovery process to find US suppliers that could make parts or finish components for Decked's products.

Having suppliers located relatively close by, as opposed to a boat ride across the Pacific Ocean, offers its own advantages.

"There's definitely pockets of expertise around the country for different types of processes," he said. "Having that expertise nearby really shortens our product development cycles."

Banta said that by 2022, the company had grown enough to justify investing tens of millions of dollars in expanding its US production capacity with its own injection-molding machines and robotic welders.

"It's not like we could just flip a switch, write a check, and turn on all that capability the next day," he said.

Banta also said the company has managed to hedge against tariff-related fluctuations in US steel prices, which are still subject to international commodity markets, since less than 5% of its cost of goods is imported.

Even so, for companies looking to build or expand their own manufacturing lines, newly imposed tariffs could make any imported machinery more expensive. Darn Tough, for example, gets its machinery from Italy, while Decked's machines come from Germany and Japan.

"If we were looking to try and build the facility that we have in a high-tariff environment, I don't know what it would look like precisely, but it definitely wouldn't be as favorable," Banta said.

"That's really hard to make multimillion-dollar capital investments if you don't know if there's going to be a significant tariff on by the time that equipment lands in a US port," he added.

Darn Tough, founded over a decade ago, has invested heavily in its facilities, workforce, and the wider community, Cabot said.

"If we really want to bring domestic manufacturing back here, yes, we need a longer runway," he said. "We need time to develop domestic supply chains. We need time to train the workforce."

With enough time, Cabot believes that the US manufacturing industry could make a comeback and create the kinds of jobs that were shipped overseas when so many companies left the country.

"We sort of jettisoned a whole demographic of people that worked in manufacturing, and I just don't see the reason why we can't bring this back, but it's going to take time," he said.